Lewis P.

Where to start? The moderation and shady behind-the-scenes deals going on here has gone off the rails. I noticed over time that the deals were becoming more and more niche, they were the same deals from the same retailers coming from the same posters every time. I started looking into it, but of course found no luck on the website itself as any discussion of this was deleted and censored. Here's a quote from them in a reply to another reviewer:

"- There are no 'fake' votes, whether up or down. Every registered member can vote once on each deal. Some members (staff and non-staff) have higher voting weight based on longevity and prior contribution. But again, there is no way we can 'fix' this and we have absolutely no desire to.

- hukd team"

There we have it, whether they intended to or not, they've just spilled the beans and stuck their foot in their mouths. Certain people on their website "staff and non-staff" have higher privileges and voting rights over regular members, so what are the 'weighting' of their votes exactly? Does a staff member have the voting strength of 10 people, 50 people, 100 people? We don't know, and this mechanism is ripe for abuse if it isn't being abused already.

Second, the censorship. Looking at the deals themselves hoping to shed some light on them, I'm met with a very unnatural, rather disturbing comment section that looks strongly filtered. The comments are mostly people talking about the deal being good and how they are thinking of buying the product with very little criticism or reflection. Now I tried to tackle this and say that a specific hot deal was selling at RRP, and looking at the timeline of the products' price it was actually pretty high; my comment was deleted for being "unhelpful", yikes, third red flag.

I didn't challenge this and made another comment on an AMD CPU, I asked if the specs was much better against older versions such as the Ryzen 1600 as the price point might not be worth it. Comment removed. Why? Because I was going off topic apparently and derailing the comment thread. All of my comments then from there on out were pre-moderated before they could see the light of day and 80% of the time were deleted for ambiguous reasons, 4th red flag.

There's other examples but this review is getting quite long. The whole thing is looking a lot more 'North Korean' every day where there's nothing but plastic fruit in the windows and you're left standing there going "come on, really, where's the real fruit?" The moderation has been kicked into overdrive and I'm pretty good at doing my research, and a lot of the 'hot' deals on there day to day are not deals, they're RRP, and the whole thing is now closely resembling the ads on my Facebook and Instagram feeds.

The fact that they stated above "there is no way we can 'fix' this and we have absolutely no desire to." says a lot, they're aware of the issues but they don't care to change them. I understand that it's a free service and that they need to make money, but what they're doing is illegal and they need to state whether a deal is sponsored or not in some way, and you need to be upfront to users whether a deal is boosted or not which can easily be done by a method shown above with 'weighted voting privileges'.

There's lots more to be said here, and I think that this was once a good site, but somewhere along the way they realised just how much money they could make off of their user base and became shady, corrupt and disingenuous. Do your own research for deals and don't trust this site anymore, that's all I can really end this on.

PS: I'm posting this here because HUKD keeps getting my comment removed from 'Trustpilot'. It seems I hit a nerve with their mods, shame that 'trustpilot' isn't so trustworthy as it has lots of boosted 5 start reviews of HUKD which were done by HUKD giving away prizes to leave reviews for them on trustpilot.